Zen and the Art Of Gun Fighting

Some films are worshipped like Christ on the cross. The Godfather (parts I and II), Easy Rider, Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, these are all films that have been elevated to the status of cinematic deities, burned into the public’s collective sub-conscious like so much napalm. There are some films however that end up becoming more like myths, whispered folklore and half remembered dreams. El Topo is one such film.

Directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean with a taste for surrealism and the alchemical, the movie became something of an underground hit in 1970, with John Lennon proclaiming it to be his favourite film after seeing it with loco Yoko in a New York art house.

Coming across like a mix of Luis Bunuel (Spanish surrealist godhead) and Sergio Leone (if you need telling who that is, get off my site) the film is truly a riotous trip. Violent in the extreme, the plot follows the adventure of the titular gun man and his seven year old son as he sets off on a quest to challenge and kill 4 Masters of the gun fighting art. Feeling more like a Samurai epic than a spaghetti western in places, the plot merely serves as a tool to get from one visually stunning and disturbing metaphor to the next, with it being abandoned almost completely half way through.

The film is that rare of all beasts, a head fuck that you enjoy. Setting your film in the desert is always going to give it that inner-space quest feel, and this is enhanced to perfection by the four gun masters. The first is essentially a Buddha or a swami, so peaceful that he offers no resistance to even bullets and they pass harmlessly through his flesh. The second is the artisan, a man who works with metal to enhance his strength, and with delicate models to enhance his accuracy and restraint. The third man is a rabbit farmer, a man who believes in passion and mercy, a man who carries a gun with only one shot. Most pertinent of all is the old master, who gave up his gun long ago and now uses a butterfly net to deflect the bullets of others. It sounds mental I know, but the pace and beauty of the film suck you right in, and it becomes a nice treatise on the nature of violence.

Not to say it isn’t without its flaws. Whether Jodorowsky intended it or not, there is an unpleasant streak of misogyny running through the film, what with the only pertinent female character, Mara, being manipulative, selfish and shallow. At one point she actually manages to get El Topo to leave his son with some monks so they can carry on alone. Also some of the acting leaves a little to be desired. Most of the main roles are fine, but you can just tell in places they didn’t have enough money for descent bit part actors and just drafted in anyone they knew willing to work for free.

El Topo is credited with helping to create to the new wave of Hollywood auteurs in the 1970s, with everyone from Dennis Hopper and Francis Coppola to Martin Scorsese citing it as an inspiration. Need I say more?

Southland Fail

How do you follow up a film that garnered as much critical acclaim and cultish devotion as Donnie Darko? I imagine, writer/director, Richard Kelly thought long and hard about this particular problem. What I can’t imagine is how he thought Southland Tales was the answer.
If you’ve never heard of it don’t worry, to say it got a limited release is like saying the Dead Sea scrolls were temporarily misplaced. It was panned so hard that the studio decided to just cut their losses and fuck it off, but can it really be that bad? Well the short answer is yes. The long answer is fuck yes.
The plot is a mess of sci-fi and meta-physics, complete with time travel, religious prophesy and political satire. In an Orwellian Los Angeles a movie star with amnesia, a porn star, a local cop, some terrorists and a renewable energy magnate all hurtle towards one another while a drug addled, Iraq war veteran narrates the end of the world. While Donnie Darko was a nuanced and personal descent into madness and quantum theory, this is like someone threw all the ideas they had at the board and saw what stuck.
If you think the plot sounds messy it’s nothing compared to the casting, it’s like a who’s who of early noughties twats. Dwayne Johnson (I never had any fucking idea what the Rock was cooking) plays protagonist Boxer Santeras in such a way as to imply that his bad acting was intentional, while Sarah Michelle Gellar sullies her all American girl reputation by coming over all foul mouthed as porn star Krysta Now (I actually quite enjoyed those bits). Perhaps the most irritating performance is Justin ‘snake hips’ Timberlake playing the narrator. In his defence it’s not entirely his fault, his dialogue is so full of needlessly weird bullshit I don’t think any actor could make it sound convincing.
I think one scene that truly sums this film up is when, for no good reason, Timberlake suddenly starts lip sinking to a Killers track (bad enough in itself) only to be joined by a chorus line of show girls. The best moments in the movie are like David Lynch cast-offs, visually interesting but completely without depth. I loved Donnie Darko as a teenager, it spoke to my pretentious neo-goth alienation, but this doesn’t speak me on any level. I’ve yet to see Kelly’s latest feature (The Box (2009)) but it’d have to be spectacularly bad to beat this.